Nature vs. Nurture: The Debate Over Skills or Competencies

Nature vs. Nurture: The Debate Over Skills or Competencies
by Kellye Whitney

Talent managers have battled this question for as long as employees have had employers: Is it better to hire for skills or competencies?

The answer might seem obvious. Hire for competency and train for skill, but there's still some rather heated discussion floating through the business space about the best way to acquire and manage talent.

"It's the age-old question: If you had an employee, would you rather have someone you could teach the skills to who had all the innate traits you were looking for, or do you need someone who can come in from day one who has specific experience and skills and can do the job without teaching?" said Michael George, product evangelist for Vurv Technology. 

The more traditional school of thinking advocates bringing people into an organization fully equipped to execute tasks for a specific job, thereby avoiding the costly investment of time and resources in training and development. In that scenario, George said talent managers are not as concerned about cultural fit, adaptability or flexibility, but things are changing. Business is moving from a predominantly skills-based economy to a knowledge-based one, and within that knowledge economy, George said companies are struggling to bring in talent that can help them not only meet their goals today, but help them meet some future challenges during the next two to 10 years.

"At the same time we're seeing a move toward a much younger population who, when they look at their own career development and advancement, think 'What else can I contribute to and do and participate in within the organization? ' There's been this shift from advancing in your job or getting better at what you do to advancing in your job and getting to do different things."

Talent managers are starting to find that when they develop employees around competencies versus skills - self-direction, adaptability and problem-solving ability versus how to perform a specific task - those employees become much more transferable across different parts of the organization. Further, George said talent managers are often more willing to invest in training around teachable skills.

"If I have somebody that I can't rely on or doesn't have the aptitude, I can never teach those things," he explained. "Technology can help companies do all this. Skill assessment has not gone away. Every company wants to know the level of skill their employees have to be consistent in the way we attract talent, evaluate that talent and what they can do for the company, how we on-board and socialize them, how we develop that employee, how we compensate that employee. There needs to be a consistent thread between each one of those pieces of the talent management puzzle."

Systems that allow talent managers more freedom to adopt a consistent, competency-based approach to hiring and performance management also are important because today's employees are increasingly mobile. George said they're not staying in one particular job or career path, let alone in one office or country.

Technology has been an asset for various kinds of skills assessment for quite some time for pre-employment, as a part of a performance review or in a development capacity, but competency assessment is a little different.

"It requires a different level of interaction, " George said. "You can assess someone's skills by putting them through a test. On the competency side, it really takes an interaction between a manager and an employee because in the performance review world, it's no longer a check box. Now, most things have to be backed up with behavioral examples." Technology can enable the increased level of involvement between manager and employee by providing everyday tools they can use to catalog different interactions.

"The next evolution we're starting to see here is, Where do you put the money? In certain industries you're going to pay a premium on highly skilled individuals, but are we going to pay for skills or competencies? We're facing some serious workforce shortages over the next couple of years as baby boomers move out," George said. "Gen Y is coming in, and companies have to find a way to see what competencies have made them successful in the past and be willing to pay for the potential those competencies are going to make employees successful in the future. Where do we invest? Let's hire people for competencies at a premium to skill sets because they haven't done anything yet."


[About the Author: Kellye Whitney is managing editor for Talent Management magazine.]